5 Common Objections to SEO (& How to Respond) - Best of Whiteboard&nbspFriday

The author's views are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of Moz.

With marketing budgets taking a hit under the economic strain of COVID-19, advocating for the value SEO can bring to a struggling business is a new take on an old battle. This popular Whiteboard Friday episode by Kameron Jenkins covers five common objections you'll hear to SEO and how to counter them with smart, researched, fact-based responses — an important skill to brush up on now more than ever.

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Video Transcription

Hey, everybody. Welcome to this week's edition of Whiteboard Friday. My name is Kameron Jenkins, and today we're going to be going through five common objections to SEO and how to respond. Now I know, if you're watching this and you're an SEO, you have faced some of these very objections before and probably a lot of others.

This is not an exhaustive list. I'm sure you've faced a ton of other objections, whether you're talking to a potential client, maybe you're talking to your friend or your family member. A lot of people have misunderstandings about SEO and that causes them to object to wanting to invest in it. So I thought I'd go through some of the ones that I hear the most and how I tend to respond in those situations. Hopefully, you'll find that helpful.

1. "[Other channel] drives more traffic/conversions, so it's better."

Let's dive in. The number one objection I hear a lot of the time is this other channel, whether that be PPC, social, whatever, drives more traffic or conversions, therefore it's better than SEO. I want to respond a few different ways depending.

Success follows investment

So the number one thing I would usually say is that don't forget that success follows investment.

So if you are investing a lot of time and money and talent into your PPC or social and you're not really doing much with organic, you're kind of just letting it go, usually that means, yeah, that other channel is going to be a lot more successful. So just keep that in mind. It's not inherently successful or not. It kind of reflects the effort you're putting into it.

Every channel serves a different purpose

Number two, I would say that every channel serves a different purpose. You're not going to expect social media to drive conversions a lot of the time, because a lot of the time social is for engagement. It's for more top of the funnel. It's for more audience development. SEO, a lot of the time that lives at your top and mid-funnel efforts. It can convert, but not always.

So just keep that in mind. Every channel serves a different purpose.

Assists vs last click only

The last thing I would say, kind of dovetailing off of that, is that assists versus last click only I know is a debate when it comes to attribution. But just keep in mind that when SEO and organic search doesn't convert as the last click before conversion, it still usually assists in the process. So look at your assisted conversions and see how SEO is contributing.

2. "SEO is dead because the SERPs are full of ads."

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The number two objection I usually hear is SEO is dead because the SERPs are full of ads. To that, I would respond with a question.

What SERPs are you looking at?

It really depends on what you're querying. If you're only looking at those bottom funnel, high cost per click, your money keywords, absolutely those are monetized.

Those are going to be heavily monetized, because those are at the bottom of the funnel. So if you're only ever looking at that, you might be pessimistic when it comes to your SEO. You might not be thinking that SEO has any kind of value, because organic search, those organic results are pushed down really low when you're looking at those bottom funnel terms. So I think these two pieces of research are really interesting to look at in tandem when it comes to a response to this question.

So how can these things coexist? Well, they can coexist because the vast majority of searches don't trigger ads. A lot more searches are informational and navigational more so than commercial.

People research before buying

So just keep in mind that people are doing a lot of research before buying.

A lot of times they're looking to learn more information. They're looking to compare. Keep in mind your buyer's entire journey, their entire funnel and focus on that. Don't just focus on the bottom of the funnel, because you will get discouraged when it comes to SEO if you're only looking there.

Better together

Also, they're just better together. There are a lot of studies that show that PPC and SEO are more effective when they're both shown on the search results together for a single company.

I'm thinking of one by Seer, they did right now, that showed the CTR is higher for both when they're on the page together. So just keep that in mind.

3. "Organic drives traffic, just not the right kind."

The number three objection I hear a lot is that organic drives traffic, just not the right kind of traffic. People usually mean a few different things when they say that.

Branded vs non-branded

Number one, they could mean that organic drives traffic, but it's usually just branded traffic anyway.

It's just people who know about us already, and they're searching our business name and they're finding us. That could be true. But again, that's probably because you're not investing in SEO, not because SEO is not valuable. I would also say that a lot of times this is pretty easily debunked. A lot of times inadvertently people are ranking for non-branded terms that they didn't even know they were ranking for.

So go into Google Search Console, look at their non-branded queries and see what's driving impressions and clicks to the website.

Assists are important too

Number two, again, just to say this one more time, assists are important too. They play a part in the eventual conversion or purchase. So even if organic drives traffic that doesn't convert as the last click before conversion, it still usually plays a role.

It can be highly qualified

Number three, it can be highly qualified. Again, this is that following the investment thing. If you are actually paying attention to your audience, you know the ways they search, how they search, what terms they search for, what's important to your brand, then you can bring in really highly qualified traffic that's more inclined to convert if you're paying attention and being strategic with your SEO.

4. "SEO takes too long"

Moving on to number four, that objection I hear is SEO takes too long. That's honestly one of the most common objections you hear about SEO.

SEO is not a growth hack

In response to that, I would say it's not a growth hack. A lot of people who are really antsy about SEO and like "why isn't it working right now" are really looking for those instant results.

They want a tactic they can sprinkle on their website for instant whatever they want. Usually it's conversions and revenue and growth. I would say it's not a growth hack. If you're looking at it that way, it's going to disappoint you.

Methodology + time = growth

But I will say that SEO is more methodology than tactic. It's something that should be ingrained and embedded into everything you do so that over time, when it's baked into everything you're doing, you're going to achieve sustained growth.

So that's how I respond to that one.

5. "You can't measure the ROI."

Number five, the last one and probably one of the most frustrating, I'm sure this is not exclusive to SEO. I know social hears it a lot. You can't measure the ROI, therefore I don't want to invest in it, because I don't have proof that I'm getting a return on this investment. So people kind of tend to mean, I think, two things when they say this.

A) Predicting ROI

Number one, they really want to be able to predict ROI before they even dive in. They want assurances that if I invest in this, I'm going to get X in return, which there are a lot of, I think, problems with that inherently, but there are some ways you can get close to gauging what you're going to get for your efforts. So what I would do in this situation is use your own website's data to build yourself a click-through rate curve so that you know the click-through rate at your various rank positions.

By knowing that and combining that with the search volume of a keyword or a phrase that you want to go after, you can multiply the two and just say, "Hey, here's the expected traffic we will get if you will let me work on improving our rank position from 9 to 2 or 1" or whatever that is. So there are ways to estimate and get close.

A lot of times, when you do improve, you're focusing on improving one term, you're likely going to get a lot more traffic than what you're estimating because you tend to end up ranking for so many more longer tail keywords that bring in a lot of additional search volume. So you're probably going to even underestimate when you do this. But that's one way you can predict ROI.

B) Measuring ROI

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Number two here, measuring ROI is a lot of times what people want to be doing.

They want to be able to prove that what they're doing is beneficial in terms of revenue. So one way to do this is to get the lifetime value of the customer, multiply that by the close rate so that you can have a goal value. Now if you turn on your conversions and set up your goals in Google Analytics, which you I think should be doing, this assumes that you're not an e-commerce site.

There's different tracking for that, but a similar type of methodology applies. If you apply these things, you can have a goal value. So that way, when people convert on your site, you start to rack up the actual dollar value, the estimated dollar value that whatever channel is producing. So you can go to your source/medium report and see Google organic and see how many conversions it's producing and how much value.

This same thing applies if you go to your assisted conversions report. You can see how much value is in there as well. I think that's really beneficial just to be able to show people like, "Look, it is generating revenue.My SEO that's getting you organic search traffic is generating value and real dollars and cents for you." So those are some of the most common objections that I hear.

I want to know what are some of the ones that you hear too. So pop those in the comments. Let me know the objections you hear a lot of the time and include how you're either struggling to respond or find the right response to people or something that you found works as a response. Share that with us. We'd all love to know. Let's make SEO better and something that people understand a lot better. So that's it for this week's Whiteboard Friday.

Kameron Jenkins is a digital marketer who specializes in content marketing and SEO. When she's not putting together content strategies, you can find her speaking about content & SEO or writing about it for publications like Moz and Search Engine Journal.

Position Zero Is Dead; Long Live Position Zero

Comments
13

Dear Kameron, Thank you for your valuable post here at Moz's Whiteboard Friday, but it hurts me wherever I see the point number two which is "SEO is dead because the SERPs are full of ads.". It's not like denying it but I really like SEO practices. That is the only reason, I usually follow Moz blog, just because to keep myself updated.

I tend to experience objections within SEO itself - push-back on the changes we want to make or the initiatives we want to move forward with to improve organic visibility.

"We don't want to change these header tags because we want to maintain consistency for UX"

"We don't have the resources to create that page or write that content"

"Our CMS won't allow X change or we'd need to hard code this feature"

We've handle several different ways but one of the most effective I've found is simply showing them the competition that is engaging that particular initiative and how they are benefiting from it. I feel the way we handle these little 'micro' initiatives can roll up into the larger concept that you are speaking to, 'why do SEO'.

Competitor analysis has been incredibly useful for this. No one likes seeing the competition outranking them. You can also use a report (like the estimated traffic or estimated traffic value reports in SEMRush) to show the prospect approximately how much more 'free' non-branded traffic the competition is getting on a monthly basis. Or showing the snippets that the competition is holding as a result of Schema or content initiatives. This approach has been effective for us.

Often we are asked the same questions as explained by you in the video, and I also feet the same way. But ROI is a very important factor in business investment I think if we can explain that to our clients it will be easy for us to take them on board so can you please create another video specifically for " ROI on SEO"

Another common objection from our clients is that SEO does not work, I mean that agencies they were working with before were not providing significant results due to a lack of knowledge. This harms the image of the SEO industry but also helps you to build your authority If you run things properly.Thanks for sharing Kameron

Thanks for sharing such a great article. As of now as per my experience seo never die because everyone can't afford the ppc campaigns and all stuff. SEO is long term startegical game we just to upgrade our self as per update.

SEO never die but their scope of areas has been broad that includes technical errors. optimize your content for RankBrain and marketing it, increases your CTR the main thing SEO needs to build a strategy which gives the reason your users to stick around on your site and implement it.

Thanks Kameron, those all look like great topics to think about including in the pitch for a new client--before they even come back with any of them as an objection. I like the "success follows investment" wording better than "the investment in SEO is front loaded," which is what I tend to use. It pays to keep focused on the basics.

Great post Kameron, when I read the objection they rings so many bells for me, sometimes I even speculate that the Search Engines are spreading the misinformation themselves as it serves their bigger purpose to put customer off SEO.

Anyway for me all marketing channels, SEO, PPC, email, offline all have their own metrics and dynamics and it therefore comes down to how good your SEO skills are compare to the returns available to your client from the different channels they make use of.